[fletchowns]

Cheating in online gaming is such a blight on the industry. Such a waste of time & money for every legitimate participant in the market, except for the groups making and profiting of the cheats of course.

I still like my idea for a third-party reputation service that has consequences for not just one game but every multiplayer game participating in the program: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28634784

I really do think it would make cheating non-existent, and allow developers to focus on building cool games instead of building invasive & ineffective rootkits we have to install just to play games online fairly.

[gxs]

At first I was optimistic that AI would greatly alleviate the issue here, but no dice.

As someone who was super competitive about the games they played (reformed, no longer play), I can tell you online cheating is completely out of hand.

There are cheats nowadays that don't even require software to be on your computer. You just put up a camera on your screen and an AI bot helps you by manipulating your controller (e.g., aim) - it really is a cat and mouse game and I don't think the issue in general will be resolved anytime soon.

I know there is an entire industry built around gaming and custom PCs so this is a pipe dream, but I'd love it if instead of all the time and effort that goes into supporting these rigs, the business models for consoles were optimized such that consoles could be top of the line rigs with very strict upgrade paths. This is really the only way I can see us actually putting a dent into this problem

[Workaccount2]

For the longest time I have wanted what is essentially a PC-console where you buy signed parts that essentially work together as a console.

It would be a true "gaming pc" in the sense that it would really only be good for gaming with very restrictive hardware and software.

[squigz]

> There are cheats nowadays that don't even require software to be on your computer. You just put up a camera on your screen and an AI bot helps you by manipulating your controller (e.g., aim)

I haven't paid much attention to that scene in a few years, but I'd be a bit surprised if things had advanced this far already. Do you have any names/links I might search about this?

[mschuster91]

> I still like my idea for a third-party reputation service that has consequences for not just one game but every multiplayer game participating in the program: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28634784

So, essentially China's Social Credit Score, just for gaming... a bad idea IMHO, a really bad one.

For one, that centralized reputation service that actually has data linked back to government-issued credentials (ID cards, passports, ...) must be ridiculously secured, because it will be among the juiciest targets on the planet - be it trolls or deranged stalkers of either gender (although most tend to be male [3]), people are willing to go to ridiculous lengths to abuse fellow gamers, especially (large) streamers. Ordering pizza, SWATting, or even cases of rape and murder [1][2], all of that has happened. Give 4chan enough incentive and they will crack open anything. Or they'll just outright infiltrate the company, someone has to run it after all, and whoever has admin access, no matter the audits and internal controls, will find a way to exfiltrate stuff.

And even assuming the reputation service doesn't get hacked, the participant games are another target - this time, not for the data that's held by the reputation service, but for reporting "cheating" by the target person. Either technical bugs or infiltrating the customer service, both can yield results - game companies largely crap on code quality, even the biggest ones (remember Rockstar's GTA JSON bug lol), and customer service jobs are low paid and have high attrition, easy targets for infiltrators.

And then gamers themselves are also valid targets. Manage to get a piece of malware onto a streamer's computer that gets detected as a cheat, boom. And that's easy to do, RCE vulnerabilities crop up every now and then for major games (Minecraft for example had BleedingPipe and log4j, GTA had one in 2024 and in 2023).

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/11/us/podcast-husband-killed...

[2] https://thelmaarose.wixsite.com/whattaweek/post/a-female-gam...

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitch-streamers-are-being-s...